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We’re passing through a low phase in Northern California – a lull that partially parallels those facing organizers from Madison to New York. The rebellious energies so evident recently seem scattered these days, dormant. The universities are quiet. And the forces that had gathered in city parks and squares, most massively at Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza, are largely absent. The encampments are broken up, the assemblies dissolved.

It took a little while for the student struggle in Quebec to gain traction with activists outside of the province. The strike began in February, but it probably wasn’t until late March that activists in Ontario paid it much mind, and not until late April or May that large numbers of people began pouring across the borders into Quebec to demonstrate alongside the Québécois, to talk to Quebec activists, and to learn from their organizing tactics and struggles so that we could push the movement beyond the confines of the Francophone province and into the rest of Canada.

We’re living in a revolutionary situation. We could reformulate the classical definition in the following terms: the ruling elites of the global capital cannot live as in the past; the workers, the precarious, the students, the poor, the living knowledge refuse to live as in the past. In the global crisis, the transnational struggles – from the North Africa insurrections to the acampadas in Spain or Syntagma Square, from the Chilean university movement to Occupy and the Québec uprising – are composed by the convergence of a downgrading middle class and a proletariat whose poverty is directly proportional to its productivity. In this context, the university is a key site.